There are several ways of grouping historians who have written about the Cold War. The most common way of organising them is according to the following categories
Orthodox historians
(George Kennan, Herbert Feis, Thomas A. Bailey)
1. George Kennan: Believed that the origins of the cold war lay in the Marxist-Leninism’s class struggle leading to revolution on a world scale. Soviet behaviour on the international stage, argued Kennan, depended chiefly on the internal necessities of Joseph Stalin's regime; according to Kennan, Stalin needed a hostile world in order to legitimize his own autocratic rule. Stalin thus used Marxism-Leninism as “a justification for [the Soviet Union's] instinctive fear of the outside world, for the dictatorship without which they did not know how to rule... for sacrifices they felt bound to demand... Today they cannot dispense it. It is the fig leaf of their moral and intellectual respectability.”
2. Herbert Feis: focused exclusively on the White House, the State Department, and state-to-state relations in his effort to assign responsibility for the origins of the Soviet-American confrontation.
3. Thomas A. Bailey: the breakdown of postwar peace was the result of Soviet expansionism in the immediate postwar years. Bailey argued Stalin violated promises he had made at Yalta, imposed Soviet-dominated regimes on unwilling Eastern European populations, and conspired to spread communism throughout the world. From this view, U.S. officials were forced to respond to Soviet aggression with the Truman Doctrine, plans to contain communist subversion around the world, and the Marshall Plan.
Revisionists
Defined as those who blame Truman's foreign policy, in opposition to the idea of the USSR's responsibility, for the start of the Cold War. According to Revisionists, the causes for friction lay in America's liberal economic policy that allowed it to prosper in foreign markets and hence increase its political influence in those regions. The example most often cited for the early stages of the Cold War is Western Europe as Revisionists, such as William A. Williams and Henry Wallace, argue that the USA's significant implication in Europes' reconstruction was firstly motivated by a desire to cement its economical dominance over Europe. This forced the Soviets to consolidate all their assets in Eastern and Central Europe, regardless of the consequences of using force, to contain American expansion.
(William A. Williams, Walter LaFeber, Gar Alperovitz, Joyce and Gabriel Kolko)
1. William A. Williams: Americans had always been an empire-building people, even while American leaders denied it. Placed more responsibility for the breakdown of postwar peace on the United States, citing a range of U.S. efforts to isolate and confront the Soviet Union well before the end of World War II. U.S. policymakers shared an overarching concern with maintaining capitalism domestically. In order to achieve that objective, they pursued an "open door" policy abroad, aimed at increasing access to foreign markets for U.S. business and agriculture. From this perspective, a growing economy domestically went hand-in-hand with the consolidation of U.S. power internationally.
2. Walter LaFeber: argued that the Cold War had its origins in 19th century conflicts between Russia and America over the opening of East Asia to U.S. trade, markets, and influence. LaFeber argued that the U.S. commitment at the close of World War II to ensuring a world in which every state was open to U.S. influence and trade, underpinned many of the conflicts that triggered the beginning of the Cold War.
3. Gar Alperovitz: According to Alperovitz, the bombs were not used on an already defeated Japan to win the war, but to intimidate the Soviets, signaling that the U.S. would use nuclear weapons to structure a postwar world around U.S. interests as U.S. policymakers saw fit i.e. he blames the cold war on the dropping of the atomic bomb.
4. The Kolkos: The Kolkos argued U.S. policy was both reflexively anticommunist and counterrevolutionary. The U.S. was not necessarily fighting Soviet influence, but any form of challenge to the U.S. economic and political prerogatives through either covert or military means. In this sense, the Cold War is less a story of rivalry between two blocs, and more a story of the ways by which the dominant states within each bloc controlled and disciplined their own populations and clients, and about who supported and stood to benefit from increased arms production and political anxiety over a perceived external enemy.
Post Revisionists
(John Lewis Gaddis, Thomas G. Paterson, Ernest May)
1. Thomas G. Paterson: viewed Soviet hostility and U.S. efforts to dominate the postwar world as equally responsible for the Cold War
2. Ernest May: “after the Second World War, the United States and the Soviet Union were doomed to be antagonists.... There probably was never any real possibility that the post-1945 relationship could be anything but hostility verging on conflict... Traditions, belief systems, propinquity, and convenience ... all combined to stimulate antagonism, and almost no factor operated in either country to hold it back” i.e. the cold war was inevitable.
3. John Lewis Gaddis had five main reasons for the outbreak of the cold war:
a. In 1945 american policy changed- the USSR only tried to react to this change.
b. US misread Soviet intentions that lead to conflict between the two
c. US/USSR ideology was incompatible but it didn’t need to lead to the cold war
d. The US was stronger politically and economically than the USSR-gave it more freedom to act but it chose to see the soviets as aggressive expansionists- formed blocs.
e. There was such confusion about US and USSR foreign policy that they didn’t know when the other was being serious or not. Also blames Molotov’s personality for exacerbating the distrust between the two countries
f. OTHER: "neither side can bear sole responsibility for the onset of the Cold War." He did, however, emphasize the constraints imposed on U.S. policymakers due to the complications of domestic politics. Gaddis has, in addition, criticized some "revisionist" scholars, particularly Williams, for failing to understand the role of Soviet policy in the origins of the Cold War.
'New' Cold War historians
The collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European bloc in the early 1990s allowed scholars and historians (from both East and West) to finally gained access to archival evidence that was inaccessible to researchers throughout the Cold War. Such unprecedented opportunities gave rise to a new field in history, often referred to as the “New Cold War History”. This new perspective is comparable to a new form of revisionism which values the importance of the superpowers' allies during the Cold War, instead of just at the superpowers themselves. Eduard Mark re-evaluates the role of ideology in the origins of the Cold War, suggesting that it was in fact central. He argues that “a socialized Eastern Europe […] was, explicitly, the ultimate aim of [Stalin’s] policies– an aim deeply rooted in his regime’s ideology and his personal beliefs (hence ideology).” Mark points out that the division between East and West was primarily the subsequent affect of Stalin’s belief that capitalism was socialism enemy and thus in order to maintain to power of the U.S.S.R he had to create a bloc of states with common socialist interest. Tony Smith places emphasis on the role of other “players” (or countries) in the expansion, intensification and prolonging of the Cold War. This therefore includes figures such as Castro and Mao, as well as events such as the Korean War, and Vietnam. Thus, the main goal of the scholars in the field is to examine the actions of other players and not solely the US-Soviet relations since; after all, the Cold War affected the entire world.
Orthodox historians
(George Kennan, Herbert Feis, Thomas A. Bailey)
1. George Kennan: Believed that the origins of the cold war lay in the Marxist-Leninism’s class struggle leading to revolution on a world scale. Soviet behaviour on the international stage, argued Kennan, depended chiefly on the internal necessities of Joseph Stalin's regime; according to Kennan, Stalin needed a hostile world in order to legitimize his own autocratic rule. Stalin thus used Marxism-Leninism as “a justification for [the Soviet Union's] instinctive fear of the outside world, for the dictatorship without which they did not know how to rule... for sacrifices they felt bound to demand... Today they cannot dispense it. It is the fig leaf of their moral and intellectual respectability.”
2. Herbert Feis: focused exclusively on the White House, the State Department, and state-to-state relations in his effort to assign responsibility for the origins of the Soviet-American confrontation.
3. Thomas A. Bailey: the breakdown of postwar peace was the result of Soviet expansionism in the immediate postwar years. Bailey argued Stalin violated promises he had made at Yalta, imposed Soviet-dominated regimes on unwilling Eastern European populations, and conspired to spread communism throughout the world. From this view, U.S. officials were forced to respond to Soviet aggression with the Truman Doctrine, plans to contain communist subversion around the world, and the Marshall Plan.
Revisionists
Defined as those who blame Truman's foreign policy, in opposition to the idea of the USSR's responsibility, for the start of the Cold War. According to Revisionists, the causes for friction lay in America's liberal economic policy that allowed it to prosper in foreign markets and hence increase its political influence in those regions. The example most often cited for the early stages of the Cold War is Western Europe as Revisionists, such as William A. Williams and Henry Wallace, argue that the USA's significant implication in Europes' reconstruction was firstly motivated by a desire to cement its economical dominance over Europe. This forced the Soviets to consolidate all their assets in Eastern and Central Europe, regardless of the consequences of using force, to contain American expansion.(William A. Williams, Walter LaFeber, Gar Alperovitz, Joyce and Gabriel Kolko)
1. William A. Williams: Americans had always been an empire-building people, even while American leaders denied it. Placed more responsibility for the breakdown of postwar peace on the United States, citing a range of U.S. efforts to isolate and confront the Soviet Union well before the end of World War II. U.S. policymakers shared an overarching concern with maintaining capitalism domestically. In order to achieve that objective, they pursued an "open door" policy abroad, aimed at increasing access to foreign markets for U.S. business and agriculture. From this perspective, a growing economy domestically went hand-in-hand with the consolidation of U.S. power internationally.
2. Walter LaFeber: argued that the Cold War had its origins in 19th century conflicts between Russia and America over the opening of East Asia to U.S. trade, markets, and influence. LaFeber argued that the U.S. commitment at the close of World War II to ensuring a world in which every state was open to U.S. influence and trade, underpinned many of the conflicts that triggered the beginning of the Cold War.
3. Gar Alperovitz: According to Alperovitz, the bombs were not used on an already defeated Japan to win the war, but to intimidate the Soviets, signaling that the U.S. would use nuclear weapons to structure a postwar world around U.S. interests as U.S. policymakers saw fit i.e. he blames the cold war on the dropping of the atomic bomb.
4. The Kolkos: The Kolkos argued U.S. policy was both reflexively anticommunist and counterrevolutionary. The U.S. was not necessarily fighting Soviet influence, but any form of challenge to the U.S. economic and political prerogatives through either covert or military means. In this sense, the Cold War is less a story of rivalry between two blocs, and more a story of the ways by which the dominant states within each bloc controlled and disciplined their own populations and clients, and about who supported and stood to benefit from increased arms production and political anxiety over a perceived external enemy.
Post Revisionists
(John Lewis Gaddis, Thomas G. Paterson, Ernest May)
1. Thomas G. Paterson: viewed Soviet hostility and U.S. efforts to dominate the postwar world as equally responsible for the Cold War
2. Ernest May: “after the Second World War, the United States and the Soviet Union were doomed to be antagonists.... There probably was never any real possibility that the post-1945 relationship could be anything but hostility verging on conflict... Traditions, belief systems, propinquity, and convenience ... all combined to stimulate antagonism, and almost no factor operated in either country to hold it back” i.e. the cold war was inevitable.
3. John Lewis Gaddis had five main reasons for the outbreak of the cold war:
a. In 1945 american policy changed- the USSR only tried to react to this change.
b. US misread Soviet intentions that lead to conflict between the two
c. US/USSR ideology was incompatible but it didn’t need to lead to the cold war
d. The US was stronger politically and economically than the USSR-gave it more freedom to act but it chose to see the soviets as aggressive expansionists- formed blocs.
e. There was such confusion about US and USSR foreign policy that they didn’t know when the other was being serious or not. Also blames Molotov’s personality for exacerbating the distrust between the two countries
f. OTHER: "neither side can bear sole responsibility for the onset of the Cold War." He did, however, emphasize the constraints imposed on U.S. policymakers due to the complications of domestic politics. Gaddis has, in addition, criticized some "revisionist" scholars, particularly Williams, for failing to understand the role of Soviet policy in the origins of the Cold War.
'New' Cold War historians
The collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European bloc in the early 1990s allowed scholars and historians (from both East and West) to finally gained access to archival evidence that was inaccessible to researchers throughout the Cold War. Such unprecedented opportunities gave rise to a new field in history, often referred to as the “New Cold War History”. This new perspective is comparable to a new form of revisionism which values the importance of the superpowers' allies during the Cold War, instead of just at the superpowers themselves.Eduard Mark re-evaluates the role of ideology in the origins of the Cold War, suggesting that it was in fact central. He argues that “a socialized Eastern Europe […] was, explicitly, the ultimate aim of [Stalin’s] policies– an aim deeply rooted in his regime’s ideology and his personal beliefs (hence ideology).” Mark points out that the division between East and West was primarily the subsequent affect of Stalin’s belief that capitalism was socialism enemy and thus in order to maintain to power of the U.S.S.R he had to create a bloc of states with common socialist interest.
Tony Smith places emphasis on the role of other “players” (or countries) in the expansion, intensification and prolonging of the Cold War. This therefore includes figures such as Castro and Mao, as well as events such as the Korean War, and Vietnam. Thus, the main goal of the scholars in the field is to examine the actions of other players and not solely the US-Soviet relations since; after all, the Cold War affected the entire world.